The way I get the color and the texture, the fiber comes to me in big five gallon buckets that weigh 42 pounds. And it’s wet. It’s recycled cotton rag fiber from the garment industry. The company I buy it from is run by papermakers.
And they take that fiber and they put it in like a huge blender, it’s called a Hollander Beater, with water, and they beat it and beat it and beat it and beat it. And I use very fine for my illustration which means I think they beat it like fourteen hours.
So then they send it to me and I then use, divide all the pulp up in containers and I color it with a pigment and add more water so that the fibers are really floating. So then I have all these colors, these big buckets out, and then I have a frame with window screen on it very tightly stretched and another frame that goes on top to keep the fiber on the screen.
And I just pour the fiber on this screen and the water drains through and the cotton stays on top. And to get specific shapes, I cut stencils. But like if you look at my books and you see one of the rocks where it kind of looks like granite, where the colors are separate, I’ll just put a little bit of each color in a cup and I just kind of swirl it a teeny bit so that they don’t really mix.
And then you get that granite effect, because actually individual fabrics all keep their own color. It’s like your eye makes them blend. It’s like four color printing. If you look at it closely, it’s all those little dots. It’s really the same way because the fibers don’t change color.
Like you don’t put yellow and blue fibers together and end up with a green fiber. What you end up with is little, tiny yellow threat next to a little, tiny blue thread and your eye blends it. So that’s the way I make my pictures and it’s very involved.
It’s not a hard process but there’s a lot of process and it takes a long time because, after I flip the picture off, I sponge it to get a lot of the moisture out and to compress the fibers together. Then I put it in a vacuum table and I suck more moisture out of it.
And then I put those in a drying press between blotter sheets which I change a twice a day and homosoak boards I change twice a day for four days. You know, it’s got bands around it to keep the paper flat. So there’s a lot of process.
I can’t do things very quickly, let’s say. Like if I was doing a water color, somebody could call me in the morning and I could do a watercolor and send it out that night. I can’t do that at all.